Shockaholic

ISBN-13: 9780743264839

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Publication Date: 11-13-2012

Pages: 176

Product Dimensions: 5.30(w) x 8.08(h) x 0.47(d)

Carrie Fisher (1956–2016) became a cultural icon as Princess Leia in the first Star Wars trilogy. She starred in countless films, including Shampoo and When Harry Met Sally. She is the author of Shockaholic; Wishful Drinking (which became a hit Broadway production); and four bestselling novels, Surrender the Pink, Delusions of Grandma, The Best Awful, and Postcards from the Edge.

Read an Excerpt

Oy! My Pa - Pa

I didn’t see my father all that much growing up, which resulted in him becoming a kind of mythic figure to me. I probably knew as much about him as some of his more rabid fans. I’d been told stories by other relatives of ours about how he would make plans to come pick up Todd and me and then not show up. This apparently occurred enough so that by the time I was three, when someone would tell me, “Your dad’s coming!” I would shrug as near to indifferently as possible and say, “Maybe.”

Several years later, after his marriage to Elizabeth Taylor had come to an end, he was living in an Asian-looking house in a development called Beverly Estates, located up on a hill overlooking, of all things, other Asian-looking houses in what is now part of Benedict Canyon. Now, my father was not what you might think of as an industrious type person. I mean, if you could get something done for you by someone else, my dad would have it done (obviously with the exception of having sex), so, to assist him in his very basic existence, he had this very capable, imposing black man named Willard, a man who he referred to as his “butler” as people still did in those days. Willard, who actually dressed like a butler, in a white jacket and black pants, pretty much took care of my dad for about twenty years. You might say he made my father—an extremely charming womanizing drug enthusiast—possible. He looked after him and cleaned up after him and even sometimes fed him (on the rare occasions that he ate, because by then he was shooting speed, courtesy of the original Dr. Feelgood, Dr. Max Jacobson).

I remember this one time, when my father was living with this beautiful Scandinavian Playboy model named Ula, my brother and I were going to spend the night. Amazing, right!? A sleepover at Dad’s! But somehow my mom found out that he was living in sin with Ula, who also happened to be a Playboy model. So, when the four of us got back from the movies, there was my mom’s Cadillac in the driveway, with her leaning against it, furiously smoking a cigarette. Then she waited while we gathered up our overnight bags and drove us home in uncomfortable silence, Todd and I staring gloomily into our laps.

On another occasion, when I was about thirteen, I remember taking a walk with him down the road near his home. So, you know, what do you say to someone who really didn’t know how to ask questions and coincidentally happened to be your father? I mean, our exchanges never really went much beyond an assortment of, “How are you?” or “What grade are you in now?” or “What’s your favorite subject?” This time though he turned to me quite casually and said, “I see you’re developing breasts.”

Naturally, I didn’t really know how to respond to this. I mean, maybe it would have been different if he’d been more of a . . . well, a more present sort of parent, you know? Like where there are a sufficient assortment of other subjects that we could discuss that might, say, provide us with any kind of context where that exchange could maybe occur, right? But all out there on its own . . . I have to say, well, it was awkward, to say the least.

Here’s the thing. Very early on in my father’s life it became obvious that he possessed a beautiful singing voice. Untrained, undeveloped, it just emerged—strong, pure, remarkable. So, from a very early age he was singing professionally, performing initially at bar mitzvahs. And somehow there wasn’t a huge leap from being the most gifted bar mitzvah boy to headlining in the Catskills.

I could go back and check one of his two autobiographies, but from what I can recall, my father was winning talent contests and appearing on local radio shows beginning at the age of twelve or thirteen, so that by the time he was fifteen, he had officially been “discovered” by none other than Eddie Cantor.

The upshot of this early career download is, my father was treated like a celebrity from a very early age. He had six siblings, but his mother doted on him. Clearly, he was her favorite, her Sonny Boy, dark haired and adorable. And it did not stop with his mom. No, from the first, all the girls loved him. And as such, whatever rules there were simply didn’t apply to him. He was young, he was talented, he was handsome, and he was Jewish. What more could you ask for? So by the time he was eighteen, my father was making more money than his father, and by the time he was twenty-one, he was making more than his father ever had. So what all this came tumbling down to was that my father could do no wrong, or if he did do what might ordinarily be considered “wrong” for someone else, for him these were just some of the quirks that might be found in the very blessed and gifted.

In his universe, from the very earliest of formative years, his every gesture, every utterance, every otherwise inappropriate action was not only indulged but in many cases celebrated. I don’t say this to excuse him, but in a way he was somehow guileless. I don’t know how else to describe it. I mean, he just . . . he always seemed to be able to assume the best about others—especially women, of course—and he was always ALWAYS up for a good time.

After the developing breasts talk, I think there was a seven-year gap where, instead of merely having no relationship, we had no relationship at all. Then, suddenly somehow it was 1977, the year everything changed. I was living in New York on the Upper West Side. Star Wars had opened recently, and I happened to be in it, and my life . . . I mean, what can you say after that? No, I’m really asking you? What can you say? Well, whatever it is, there’s every chance it would be said in a very weird robotic voice. Coincidentally, this happened at almost the exact same time when my term as a teenager was up. But because I had been in Star Wars, for the first time I could afford my very own apartment. I paid the rent with checks that had my name on them, money I’d earned by playing Princess Leia Organa in a movie that was so popular—so unbelievably popular—that it took whatever my life had been up to that point and transformed it into this very different thing. I mean, sure I’d spent my whole life around fame. Who hasn’t, right? But that fame was generated by my parents. This shine was mine.

Well, sort of mine anyway. And by that, I mean that Princess Leia was famous. And I just happened to look amazingly like her—I mean aside from her hair. But this was not dissimilar to the associative fame I’d lucked into with my scandal-generating folks. I now had this new and super-attenuated, dialed-up sci-fi fame and if that wasn’t enough, this fame came with Leia Organa’s salary. And it was with that salary that I rented my very own semi-private apartment between 90th and 91st on Central Park West—300 CPW. Yes, that’s right, the El Dorado. Apartment 12J1 with its actual terrace quietly overlooking . . . other buildings. No, it wasn’t big or fancy, but whatever it was, it was mine. Mine not only to live in, but to decorate and even invite people to. My life had begun, and gosh darn it all to Pete, it was gonna have all the earmarks of adventure and all the Groucho Ear Marx of fun. So there it was—spread out all around me. So, what else could I do but hunker down and live it? Naturally, one of my first stops on this new life’s journey of mine was yes, that’s right—dropping acid.

Acid had become my new best friend, my drug of choice, my companion in chief. It agreed with me—whoever I happened to be at that not so sharp point. Something about it was more of the same for me—but in a way that sameness was oh so very far from redundant. My experience of almost everything and everyone I encountered had always been intense, but I found it difficult to believe that everyone else’s was, too. But I found that when I took acid with whatever friend I was lucky enough to take it with, I knew with an almost sufficient amount of certainty that we felt something close to exactly the same way.

So, it was a hot summer night in Manhattan, one of those nights just made for hallucinating that my friend (and Jerry Garcia’s friend) Mike and I dropped some liquid Owsley LSD and we lay out on a blanket on my terrace, gazing rapturously up at the night sky listening to Keith Jarrett, the Grateful Dead and Bob Dylan playing on the turntable, with the volume turned up high, realizing our way to morning.

That summer, with an ever-increasing appetite for closures—random and otherwise—my open mind stretching ever wider, wider, reveling out there, shimmering in the distance . . . Who was that? It appeared to be—why, yes, it was a man—that was it! A silver-haired, half pajama-clad, plum-eating and Kent-smoking . . . WAS it!?!! YES! It was! It was my stepfather. That flatulent albeit well-groomed shoe tycoon.

Harry Karl, the man who had disappeared from our lives—1for very, very good reason—more than five years earlier, and to whom I’d never actually said goodbye. Wow . . . yes . . . it was all too crystal clear. Now would be the perfect time to correct this oversight.

So, with the acid as my guide, I picked up the phone and dialed the inexplicably remembered ten numbers that would deliver me back to Harry. (God, remember dialing?) After enough rings to convince me I’d woken him, he picked up the phone and growled in his five-packs-a-day voice, “Yeah, hello?” prompting me to cheerily say something along the lines of, “Listen, I just wanted to call you because, you know, we did actually live together for twelve years or so and, even though you and my mom got divorced, you never did anything specifically awful to me, I mean, not really at all, right? So I just wanted to say, you know, I’m not mad at you or anything and I’m, you know, I’m sorry I never spoke to you for so many years up until now.” I may have even thrown in some version of “You were always good to us,” which, I mean, he really kind of had been, in his nonverbal, having-sex-with-manicurists-who-turned-out-to-be-whores-and-taking-all-of-our-mother’s-money sort of way. Hey, at least he’d been present, right? Even though that presence included not wearing pajama bottoms and passing gas incessantly.

I don’t actually recall the ensuing conversation much beyond this point, but ultimately I know I was glad I’d called him, because soon after that we received word that he’d suddenly and quite unexpectedly passed away. And not surprisingly, it was a fairly goofy, rarely heard-of type of death.

Apparently late one afternoon, while he was shuffling and wheezing his way through the lobby of the Beverly Hills Hotel, a man approached him, smiling and holding out his hand, saying cheerily, “Hey, Harry, how the hell are you? Long time no see!!!” and gave him a friendly punch in the arm. It was several hours later that same night, that Harry was rushed to the hospital. It seemed that a blood clot had formed in his recently punched arm, which then subsequently continued on to a place it didn’t belong at all, leaving Harry very, very dead and subsequently leaving me very, very grateful that I’d dropped acid that night with Mike, inspiring me to talk, however briefly, to Harry before he’d passed on to that great shoe store in the sky.

Anyway, having called Harry, I found myself working backwards through my mother’s husbands, leaving me to now call my actual and very own father, Eddie Fisher.

Well, as luck would have it, by now the acid was peaking, and I found a person very like myself saying something like, “Hey, Dad, you know, whatever, I love you, and I’m sorry we never actually connected that much, and, you know, maybe one day you could, I don’t know, maybe one day you’d like to come visit me here in New York sometime or whatever.”

Well, wouldn’t you know it? Eighteen hours later the doorbell rang and there, having caught the first flight out from LAX to JFK, was my long-lost papa, a grin on his face and a knockoff Louis Vuitton bag in his hand. Well, what could I say—however unconvincingly—but, “Come on in! Welcome!”

As it happened, I had very recently begun living with Paul Simon at that point, but I was still spending time in my apartment. Especially when Paul and I would break up, as we periodically were wont to do. But as a result of my acid-induced reach-out, I was no longer able to move back to my place when Paul and I had our little difficulties. Like other couples, we remained living together in our very own, very comfortable hell.

Eventually (and/or after a year) my father moved to an apartment around the corner from Paul. And it was not too long after that that he began sneaking drugs to me. This was when, like most fathers and daughters, we began doing coke together. Our relationship had started with me longing for him to visit, eventually evolving into my being desperate for him to leave, settling finally and comfortably into us being drug buddies. As I’ve been known to say, in my family, the apple doesn’t fall down far from the tree.

After our New York inbred incarnation had run its delightfully inappropriate course, he managed to relocate to San Francisco, remarrying yet again. Only this time his wife was neither a beauty nor a celebrity, but was a lovely, wealthy Asian woman named Betty Lin. In addition to her wealth, Betty’s ample attractions included her being very much a family person. And so, it was in large part due to her that I began to see my father more regularly. And not only me, but my brother and my two half-sisters from his marriage to Connie Stevens, Joely and Trisha, also enjoyed this resurgence in our no longer neglected relations. As if all this weren’t enough, Betty turned out to be an enormous Debbie Reynolds fan! So my very estranged parents occasionally found themselves once more at the mercy of one another’s company.

But for all of that, my father was this unbelievably lovable person. I mean, you know those people that for some inexplicable reason are just a pleasure to be around? Well, maybe you don’t, but I do, and my father was very much one of these endearing humans. Even after everything he both did and didn’t do, I somehow couldn’t help but enjoy spending time with him.

My father wasn’t successful with women because he had been rich and famous, though that didn’t hurt. People gravitated toward him because he enjoyed them. He had a way of making you feel special. Because when you stepped into his sphere, you were all but guaranteed a good time. And though you knew with every part of your being that time with him couldn’t be scheduled or relied on, all that was somehow forgotten within minutes of finding yourself in his company. There you were yet again, the chump that couldn’t seem to resist his playful charisma. Not even after promising yourself that the next time you found yourself succumbing to his eternally boyish charm—you’d remember, you wouldn’t be that innocent putz who would buy into anything he promised. You would never again end up going through the withdrawals after, inevitably, once more finding yourself being denied access to that incredible way he had of making you feel not only special but necessary, even essential, to him.

And all of this was as true to him as it was to you while it was happening. You can’t counterfeit feelings like that, right? Again, I’m really asking. In my opinion though—in the well-appointed interim, until you get back to me—the answer is absolutely and unequivocally NO!

• • •

I had workshopped my show Wishful Drinking at the Geffen Theatre in Westwood, California, for a number of months before moving it up to the Berkeley Rep theatre in 2008. This was where we settled in to further work on it with an eye on eventually taking it to Broadway.

I’ve always been one of those people who loved San Francisco, and not just because it’s a beautiful old city situated around a sparkling bay. Over the years I’ve found myself spending quite a lot of time there attending to all things intergalactic. And, in addition to George and all the folks who work for Lucasfilm, over time I found I’d collected a small group of other friends, several possessing a sort of literate/spiritual bent.

And, as if all these enticements weren’t enough, it appeared that my now newly widowed father—Rest in Peace Betty Lin—was in dire need of a mother. And as I had been recently suspended from my mothering duties, I was free to parent anyone who might enjoy being parented by me in the otherwise awful extended interim. And who should turn out to long to be cuddled and mothered like the big bad overgrown baby boy he’d always been? You guessed it—Eddie! That’s right, I became my father’s mother. It turned out that the best way to have a loving reliable familial bond with my dad was for me to give him everything I’d ever wanted from him, and in so doing, corny as it sounds, I’d get everything I gave him back again. In spades, clubs, hearts, and diamonds. He needed me. Finally. Somehow and happily, nothing and no one but me would do.

Over the course of the time I found myself performing in Berkeley, my father confided in me that there was something he wanted to do before his life was over. He didn’t have a bucket list as it turned out. What he did have was a bucket wish. And it took a few weeks for him to express just exactly what that wish was. And when you hear what it was, you might understand just why he was somewhat shy about sharing it with his eldest child.

What my father wanted was access to the recess between a woman’s legs. One last romp—a romp at his age being a fairly limited affair, but that did not concern him. He’d devoted his entire life to getting laid, sacrificing everything he’d ever had to it—his career, his fortune, and basically any real, lasting relationship with either friends or family. Now, I’m sure many men at the end of their lives entertain similar fantasies. The only difference here was that most of them would be too embarrassed to admit such an undignified longing in someone of such advanced years. But my father had no such compunctions, though initially it wasn’t me to whom he confided this final desire of his. It was to my friend Garret, who traveled with me also as one of the producers of my show. He called Garret “Cowboy,” though in later years there were times he was convinced that Garret possessed an assortment of other identities including, but not limited to, President Barack Obama. It turned out that after suffering several strokes as the years progressed, my father was showing increasing signs of dementia. Of course, his daily marijuana intake didn’t help matters, but ultimately I don’t think it was the pot that caused my father to confuse a 32-year-old white boy from Jackson Hole, Wyoming, with our president. But in his right mind or out of it, his passion for one last pass at pussy remained undiminished.

So one night, while I was performing my show, I made an announcement that if anyone knew any prostitutes, please leave a note with one of the ushers. I did this in large part not only to amuse and/or shock people; it turned out that it wasn’t all that simple to find and secure the services of a prostitute. At least not in San Francisco in 2008. I’d spent inordinate amounts of time searching Craigslist. But after a while, I would’ve perused any list! Schindler’s! Or Franz! I fantasized that even though my brother and father were far from close, I might be able to induce my brother to take on this task, but that potential bonding experience did not come to pass.

As it happened, though, my father had a very capable, kind nurse named Sarah, a Mongolian woman who devoted herself to his care in his declining years. But after a while my dad’s care became more . . . challenging, you might say, so Sarah hired a very cute little girl who ill advisedly came to work wearing a little outfit consisting of a short little skirt and a little shirt that ended very close to where her midriff began—a kind of slutty cheerleader type of get-up. And it wasn’t long before Sarah phoned to tell me that this new part-time nurse had expressed outrage—OUTRAGE!—when my elderly parent attempted to put his arthritic hand on her breasts. Which was enough to bring us to a moment where this girl accused him of sexual harassment. Now, this was a man who not only couldn’t do anything for himself anymore—he could barely move—but would also mistake a blond 32-year-old white boy for Barack Obama. At that point, had he been able to understand what was going on, my dad would have seen it as something of an honor to be accused of sexual harassment. But I had to tell him that I had talked to the girl (which wasn’t true, though Sarah had) and that she’d apparently said, “What does he think I am, a prostitute?” I don’t think it was so much that he thought she was a hooker as that he hoped she might be induced to behave like one.

Anyway, I’ve thought since then that this is one of the best ideas in the world for a movie: the quest to get your very confused, very stoned “Puff Daddy” a hooker. Who do you give to the man who is about to lose everything? He couldn’t even get a blow job because he was past the point where anyone with a decent blow job would consider hiring him.

I had heard that once an older person—and especially an older infirm person—falls and breaks his hip, it’s just a matter of time before he passes away. And not all that much time, the proverbial “they” say. So you can appreciate my concern when Sarah called one morning in mid-September to tell me that my father, who, despite having been unable to walk for the past five or six years due to a series of strokes and a beyond-obsessive devotion to the daily smoking of marijuana, had somehow forgotten the nonnegotiable fact of his irrevocable and enduring immobility. And, so, on this particular sunny Berkeley morning, he had risen to greet the day and, swinging his useless legs over the side of his bed, stood up for a nanosecond before falling and breaking his hip. And, naturally, my Eddie, being so much more than some average everyday ordinary Eddie, didn’t just break his hip—he broke it sort of in the place that prevents someone of his age from spending more than another week or two on the planet.

So now we all knew that it was only a matter of time before we’d lose him. Somehow, though, I expected that the time he had remaining would be somewhat longer. And because of that unreliable assumption, I wasn’t with him the night that he suddenly up and expired. And though there’s something ironically perfect that after a lifetime of enduring his absences I wasn’t present for his death—well, this somehow continues to haunt me. I don’t mean that he haunts me. I just wish I had been there. I wish it wasn’t just another missed opportunity with Eddie. Only unfortunately this time, it turned out to emanate from my end.

Was this my unconscious way of giving him a taste of his own ever-elusive, intoxicating presence? Maybe. I like to think not, though. I prefer to imagine that I’m not that obvious. Let me dream.

But by the end, it turned out that the overseeing of my father’s care had ultimately fallen to me. And I’d come to be very grateful for this fumble. I mean, we both knew I was under no obligation to arrange and oversee his care. Whatever I did for him was because I wanted to. Not as some kind of payback that, as my dear old doting dad, was his due.

But he actually had been there when I had entered this world. The story goes that he watched me being born. And, though he fainted from the offensive horror of it, he was really there at the beginning of our shared time on the planet, just as I wasn’t there at the end of it. Like I said, we both knew that I didn’t owe him anything. But owing didn’t have any place in this. I owed it to who we’d come to mean to each other in the seven or eight years leading up to his death.

And so, yes, I do regret that I wasn’t there to hold his hand at the end. I regret that I wasn’t there to gaze at him with tender, anxious eyes. Go figure. Maybe I’m just quirky that way. But there’s something else that factors its way onto this missed death bed boat before it left the harbor.

The thing is, I’ve helped people die. Not that they couldn’t have done it without me. And lord knows all too many people end up doing it alone. But I’ve kept my fair share of vigils at the bedsides of those with only a few moments, or days, or weeks to spare. I know many folk that might find this a fairly daunting proposition, but there’s something in that final fatal situation that I understand completely. I know what’s required inherently of me, and I know that I’ll do everything to be equal to this considerable situation. Everyone understands their role. One stays until the other can’t anymore. And the one who won’t be able to stick around is much more important than the one who can. And I find relief in the understanding and acceptance of the unspoken urgency in this arrangement. I’ll love them until they can’t be loved anymore in this whatever you call it . . . what’s the word? Dimension? Plane? Could it be as riotlessly new-agey as that?

In any event, I have accompanied several of my friends to that place where they can’t be escorted any longer. Where you remain with a dying person, accompanying them as far as you can go, ultimately finding yourself standing still while they’ve kept moving. Moving until that place where they stop, arriving at that terrible stillness that goes on way longer than any life someone might have led. You continue leading your life while they follow theirs into the great beyond. Being and nothingness. You love them until they can’t feel loved anymore, then you keep on loving them as if they were still there—as if there’s been a reprieve at the last moment and fate has reversed itself. It all turned out to be a bad dream that you both had and now get to wake from.

My friend Julian was the first. Julian needed a prom date to take him to the dance that he wouldn’t return from, his last waltz. Julian was one of the earliest sufferers of the AIDS virus in New York. Born in Australia, he’d moved to Manhattan, where he eventually came to work for Paul Simon’s business manager at the time, Ian Hoblyn.

When Paul and I split up for the last time, I moved back to Los Angeles, which is where Julian contacted me a short time later to see if he could stay with me before he continued on to Australia, where his family would then care for him. But what we didn’t know—but probably should have, could have, guessed at—was that the flight from New York to Los Angeles would take whatever vitality that Julian could lay claim to. So for him to now get on yet another even longer flight to go somewhere else that was even farther away . . . Well, that was just a thing that wasn’t going to happen.

So a new plan had to be devised. And that plan included Julian staying with me for several weeks or more—until staying anywhere fell outside Julian’s formerly considerable skill set. One night Julian threw up what must have been about a pint of bright red blood into a stark white bowl. Then, in response to my 9-1-1 call—or rather, shriek—four men arrived at my home wearing what appeared to be space suits, from their fishbowl helmets to their Pillsbury Doughboy outfits, complete with inflated gloves and boots. And these four men drove Julian to a hospital over the hill into the valley where he spent his remaining days in and out of consciousness with his sister, a male nurse, and me by his side. Making that final transition from wherever he was to wherever he was going, there I was, his friend and devotee, learning as I—or as he—went, so I could potentially use this daunting skill set again at a later date. And as we watched, his nurse said quietly, “It won’t be long now. He’s gone into reverse labor. He’s starting to die.” And die he did. Death had come to take him.

But it wasn’t entirely selfish. After death takes someone from you, it gives you something back. It makes smells sharper and the sun brighter and sex more urgent. It’s as though you’re living for two now. Their memory lives inside you, and you feed it. You live for them now that they can’t anymore. So given the choice between Julian and the rest of us, death chose our friend, our loved one, over us. He took the bullet, and we were left standing there with our empty guns, watching a tiny cloud of smoke barely making its way out of the barrel.

Michael was next. This is what I found myself thinking at his death bed, located between his death chair and death end table. There he was on his last legs, last words, last laughs. It was Michael’s turn to be the first to cross over the finish line. Would he be waiting patiently up ahead for our inevitable arrival? Exhausted from running our own last lap, would he be there to ease us into death as we’d eased him out of life?

Michael’s light was dimming while the bright light of loss grew brighter and brighter in us until we were blazing with the grief of losing him, yet unable to warm ourselves. But I could swear that I could see things more clearly once he’d passed. Clearly and completely different, at least for a while.

Over time I found that my love transformed into longing. A slow turning, like winter to spring. And it was in the spring that I started to breathe a little easier. I noticed the flowers that were growing instead of those ones that I placed on a grave. I looked at things and thought, “He’d have loved to see this”—a swarm of fireflies, sunset on a lake, a two-headed fish, the palest of blue eyes. I found myself looking two and three times, again and again, at these glories that I was continuously stumbling across, looking once for myself and once for the one who had gone missing.

But I tell myself at least I had them for as long as they lasted, whether it be a